More on Golf Club Tours and Tournaments

Since HB Studios first announced The Golf Club they have done a great job of consistently providing information and insight on the upcoming game through videos and developer blogs. Considering it is a brand new series and carries no form of licenssing they have created an impressive level of awareness in a short period of time.

Tours
Tours are The Golf Club’s version of a playlist. You can pick your favourite courses — whether they’re yours or from another designer — and order them into your own Tour. Once you’re happy with a Tour, you can name it and publish it to the server for all to play. Players can search for Tours, then play, rate and favourite them just like user-created courses. Each Tour keeps track of its own unique leaderboard listing with the best aggregate scores posted to it.

Tours were a great first step in quenching our thirst for competition. It probably would’ve been enough if it were only going to be us playing The Golf Club, but we realized something – once The Golf Club launches there will be many people other than us playing the game and posting scores to the Tours we create. We wanted to be able to continue our personal, discrete competitions; and of course others would want the same too. This problem meshed perfectly with the problem of solving how to design Tournaments for The Golf Club.

Tournaments
A Tournament is a fixed-duration, single-entry-per-person instance of a Tour. Pick the Tour you want the Tournament to take place within, choose duration, and whether it will be an Open, Friends Only or Invitational affair. Once the Tournament is published it is available for all eligible players to compete in. When the Tournament’s time-frame has expired all scores are aggregated onto that Tournament’s leaderboard—just like a Tour—but these scores are locked to the Tournament instance. Anybody viewing the leaderboard can sort by best aggregate score, or by points — earned by ranking well in each Event within the Tour.

Once we realized we had the capacity for Tours and Tournaments we were excited to design features that would fit the design pillars of The Golf Club. Now that we’re through that stage we’re eager to get them done and in the hands of our Beta testers. It’s all about sharing what you’ve built with others and interacting with that community.